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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of a new volume in its Praxis series: Visuality's Romantic Genealogies, edited by Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid.

The volume is dedicated to both excavating the Romantic genealogies of visuality and charting directions for the ways in which the study of Romantic visual culture may redraw the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary bounds of Romanticism, bringing diverse, and in some instances new, objects and their ethical, political, and aesthetic stakes into view. The essays investigate three broad inquiries: 1) technologies of vision and objectivity’s slippages; 2) the indigenous or transplanted fruits of visuality’s New World Genealogies and 3) the role of proto-photography, panopticism, and slavery in the spectral formation of Romantic visuality. Emphasizing the ways we interpret visuality in romantic culture, the volume invites reconsideration of media, practices, and discourses that would seem to belong to earlier and later periods—from the artifacts and modes of viewing attached to curiosity and to technologies and ways of imaging and imagining that have become aligned with photography and the digital. The volume includes an editor's introduction by Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid, with essays by Sophie Thomas, Marcus Wood, Matthew Francis Rarey, Kay Dian Kriz, and Lucy Kamiko Hawkinson Traverse.

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of a new volume in its Praxis series: Tragedy, Translation and Theory: In Honor of the Work of Thomas J. McCall.

This issue takes its inspiration from the writings on translation, tragedy and twentieth-century literary theory in the work of the late Romanticist and comparatist Tom McCall, who died suddenly in January 2011. Three noted Romanticists and literary theorists, taking off from specific critical essays by McCall, explore the centrality of Greek tragedy as it emerges in Romantic writing (especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin), for philosophy, literature, and literary theory. Passing between the Greek and the German (notably in Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles), and between the literary and the philosophical, these papers offer new and original insights into the complex ways in which Romantic writing was bound to the translation and interpretation of Greek writing and the unique manner in which twentienth-century literary theory emerged from the Romantic reflection on the relation between language and the emergence (and suspension) of thought. Edited and introduced by Cathy Caruth, with essays by Cathy Caruth, Ian Balfour, David S. Ferris, and three contributions from Tom McCall (1 |2 |3).

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We've just become aware of a "marathon" reading of Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude read by folks at the University of Cambridge in 2010. Complete audio of the reading is available here. Below is a sample reading from Book First:

Thanks to Catherine Ross on the NASSR listserv for sharing the link.

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The British Library's Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians offers a wealth of material on the British 19th century, including William Blake’s notebook, childhood writings of the Brontë sisters, the manuscript of the Preface to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and an early draft of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

According to the site,

Discovering Literature features over 8000 pages of collection items and explores more than 20 authors through 165 newly-commissioned articles, 25 short documentary films, and 30 lesson plans. More than 60 experts have contributed interpretation, enriching the website with contemporary research. Designed to enhance the study and enjoyment of English literature, the site contains a dedicated Teachers’ Area supporting the curriculum for GCSE and A Level students.

Contextual materials of various sorts--newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and maps--accompany the materials, along with various teaching resources. The site is navigable by authors, works, themes, and "collection items," individual objects held in the library's collections.

This previously unpublished work tells the story of a female Grand Tour, something quite rare, and of an extended artist's visit to Italy, something quite common. In 1787 Flaxman set out for France and Italy with her husband, the sculptor John Flaxman, and a small company of fellow travelers. During her journey and in the months that followed her arrival in Rome, Flaxman kept a perceptive and entertaining journal for the benefit of friends at home, a group that included William and Catherine Blake. Personal yet nonetheless typical of its genre, Flaxman's Journey serves as an excellent introduction to English travel writing just before the French Revolution, and to the late-eighteenth-century international arts scene. It also reveals the challenges and rewards of being an atypically poor traveler and an aspiring woman writer.

In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid migration of the field of translation studies from a position as “a backwater of the university” in the 1990s—to cite Lawrence Venuti’s oft-quoted complaint—to being a central object of scholarly inquiry in literary and cultural studies and beyond. Even as numerous conferences, symposia, and institutes are organized around the topic of translation, course readings in English literature have not yet come to reflect the same transformative impulse. In diverse ways, the scholars collected in this volume make compelling cases for expanding the repertoire of texts worthy of study in English classrooms to include translations, addressing texts by a wide range of authors and translators including Lord Byron, J. W. von Goethe, S.T. Coleridge, P.C. de Laclos, George Eliot, Sei Shônagon, and Germaine de Staël.

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Romantics Circles is delighted to announce the publication of William Godwin’s Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children from Three to Eight Years of Age (1805), edited by Suzanne L. Barnett and Katherine Bennett Gustafson.

This edition is the first installment of a complete critical edition of William Godwin’s ten contributions to his Juvenile Library. It makes available for the first time since 1824 the first text that Godwin both authored and published under his own imprint, along with a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes by the editors. While literary historians have long been aware that radical author Godwin wrote and published children's books, these works are substantially less visible than his novels and philosophical writings. Yet, the profound cultural impact of Godwin's children's literature—especially as an expression of his social politics—necessitates their reproduction and welcomes further critical inquiry.

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication in its Praxis series of Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism, edited by Eric Lindstrom, whose description of the volume follows:

At a climactic point in Part Four of The Claim of Reason (1979), the American philosopher Stanley Cavell arrives at the striking conclusion that “romanticism opens with the discovery of the problem of other minds, or with the discovery that the other is a problem, an opening of philosophy.” Cavell’s account of how Romanticism opens is not historical in orientation, but rather offers a rich conceptual, aesthetic, and ethical site of concern that both interrupts and generates his life’s work— thus presenting an opening for scholars and students of the Romantic Period to think the subject of Romanticism anew in studying (with) Cavell. The essays in this volume seek to provide the fullest account to date of Cavell’s prompting by Romanticism in light of his powerful record of engagement with British and European Romantic texts: a body of literature on which Cavell has performed several bravura readings.

Cavell’s writings and distinctive philosophical approach have garnered an increasing amount of sustained attention over the past several years, particularly since the publication of Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2005) and Little Did I Know (2010). Yet beyond his major American subjects of Thoreau and Emerson, there is still little published scholarship that engages Cavell’s thought at extended, close range with Romanticism as the moment that matters so much him: the “perfectionist” opening that comes after religion, but before philosophy. The present collection—with essays (in suggested reading order) by Emily Sun, Paul Fry, Eric Lindstrom, Eric Walker, and Anne-Lise François, and a substantial Afterword by Joshua Wilner—hinges between the efforts to record Cavell’s engagement with British Romantic texts and to stage new interventions.

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Professor Susan Wolfson has hipped us to a new article in this week's Rolling Stone that discusses, among many other things, an atmosphere at academic institutions that sees Percy Shelley as an ongoing cultural and social threat:

Meanwhile, in Baghdad's universities, departments were rife with sectarianism, and corruption was rotting out standards. Students bought their way into college, then through it. Professors bought research. Religious pressures constrained classes and content. Nadia Faydh, an English professor, was banned from teaching Marxist literary criticism and chastised by her department chair for teaching Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry," a canonical text of English Romanticism. Students had been offended by the way Shelley equated love and poetry with religion.

Wolfson calls the entire article by Roy Scranton "compelling, lucid, powerful." The full text is available here.

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Romantic Circles, a pioneering website focused on Romantic era literature and culture, is seeking a new Editor of its Reviews section. Now in its 18th year, Romantic Circles receives nearly 400,000 unique visits from users in 190 countries, who view a total of approximately 800,000 pages per year.

The Editor of Reviews will be working with our editorial team to expand the scope of reviews to include not only monographs, but also digital humanities projects and research tools. Under consideration, as well, is a more informal section of reviews that would cover representations of Romanticism in popular media.

Please send nominations, including self-nominations for RC Review Editor, to rc-geneds@umd.edu. Nominations should include the candidate’s contact information.